Earlier this year at the Daytona Supercross, we met Irish Saunders, who showed us the first MX efforts from Hoosier Racing tires. Irish has been extremely passionate about MX, having raced himself back in the day. One of his sons, Eric, was sponsored by Tony Stewart, and was well on his way to a pro career before suffering a spinal injury that left him paralyzed. Eric has since switched to racing a sprint car with hand controls, and won a championship this year.

This week, while we were in South Bend, Indiana, for the Motocross of Nations at RedBud, we stopped by their headquarters in Lakeville, to get a better idea of what Hoosier is all about. We got a rather extensive tour through the entire manufacturing process. We got to see everything from techs weighing out the individual components of rubber, carbon black, and other ingredients, to how the rubber is mixed up into sheet.

We got a peek into the labs, where the finished rubber can be tested in any number of ways you can imagine (strength, stretch, durometer), and a few you can't. They also test individual components of the raw materials that arrive from vendors to make sure that it meets their standards.

There's also a tire testing lab where they can expose finished tires to a variety of stress tests. For example, one can take them up to as much as 300 mph, while mixing in a bunch of different factors to stress them, like camber angle. There's a heavy steel cage that surrounds that particular test unit, and the operators sit behind a thick concrete wall with ballistic glass windows that look inside.

We also got to check at how the casings are created, as a variety of fabrics were coated in rubber, and how the tread areas were added...either in one strip, or very thin strip that winds onto the tire (think like fishing line as it works back and forth across a reel). They also make up the wire beads.

Once the components of the casings were built up, we saw how they'd go into molds to achieve their final shape. To paint a little bit of a mental picture for you, think of it like this. Before they go into the mold, they look like a cylinder that has little resemblance to what you'd think a finished tire would look like. Where the tread would normally be, it's sort of a rubber "blank." There are two halves to the mold, and there's a steam-powered internal rubber bladder that epands from the center to force the casing outward and into the mold. The amount of heat, pressure and force required to create these treads is crazy. After a few minutes, when the mold reopens you end up with a something that you'd recognize as a finished product.

Think it's done yet? No way. There's everything from hand checks of the tires, to X-ray examinations, and a vaccum test that quickly shows whether there are any air bubbles in the interior of the material.

(While all this stuff was fascinating, unfortunately, it was off-limits to cameras).

Now that we're out of the Confidentiality Zone, you can listen to GuyB and Irish talking about what's new (click the play button below), and check out the photo tour below that.

Cool article. I’ve known Irish for a few decades, and you’ll never meet a guy more passionate about racing and tires than him. He’s in for the long haul regarding motorcycle off-road tires, so look for more development as time progresses.